Tocqueville's New Political Science in the Shadow of the Old

This article explicates Tocqueville’s famous assertion that “a new political science is needed for a world entirely new” by drawing a contrast with the old political science to be superseded. Part One establishes the evidence, contextual and textual, for the claim that the old political science to which Tocqueville refers is the Enlightenment project as interpreted by the self-proclaimed heirs of the philosophes in the revolutionary generation: the Idéologues. Part Two argues that taking this foil seriously allows us to see the novelties associated with Tocqueville’s new democratic political science: the ways in which he hoped to avoid the dangerous temptations and seductions of the old and his subtle moralized interpretation of intérêt bien entendu. Much impressive recent scholarship recovers the importance of Tocqueville’s aristocratic interlocutors; this article argues that he was also in veiled conversation with liberals of a particularly democratic and utilitarian kind, and that he self-consciously adopted their idealism and assumed their mantle.